Category: Local Search

I was having an interesting conversation with an agency client this weekend about why mobile traffic had been flat/down to their retailer clients’ location pages since the end of 2015. My initial response touched on part of the answer: “I suspect they are experiencing a change in traffic to their site as a result of the anchoring of the Local 3-pack in SERPs that occurred in Fall 2015. Here’s a post I did on this phenomenon at the time:

I would easily take this bet. Today, tomorrow and twice on Sunday. Now, I wasn’t at MozCon, and I didn’t see Dr. Pete’s preso. Just the Twitter stream. So even knowing how Twitter and games of telephone can distort someone’s thesis, I would STILL take this bet. And the reason why is simple, people always overlook local search and the deeper layers of the web. Now look, I don’t need to tell our regular readership that local search is the…

The news that IAC’s Home Advisor is merging with Angie’s List to form a new public company is both surprising and not all that surprising. In InsiderPages’ early days, we considered Angie’s List one of our top competitors but we were always baffled why anyone would pay to get access to their members’ reviews, particularly when sites like ours and Yelp’s were giving the content away for free. Back then Angie had the last laugh, as InsiderPages got acquired by…

Gannett’s announcement yesterday that its ReachLocal division has acquired SweetIQ really pissed me off in that the day after Yext’s* IPO I had a great conversation with a Local vet where I predicted that the success of the IPO would set off a wave a M&A in the Local Marketing Tech sector and damned if I wasn’t going to write an all-knowing post asap so I could look like a genius when it happened. Thanks to my endless capacity for…

It was a pretty big deal to the world of local search when Google removed “Search Tools” from their search engine. It may seem like NBD, but everyone in local search knew that that was the best way to see what a local search looked like in a different location from your own. After that was eliminated, there was a mad dash to find out how to best spoof searches from other locations. While there were a few ways to do…

I was reading through the transcript of the excellent discussion of ranking factors by friends of the show Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling and figured now would be a good time to post the results of the survey I conducted about the trimodal local search algorithm. The question was pretty basic: When it comes to prominence, relevance, and proximity what do you think is the most important type of local search ranking factor? Well, the results are in, and at least…

The 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors, a survey of Local SEO professionals on what they think it takes to rank in local search, was just released at MozCon Local/Local U. Andrew and I both love participating in the survey, as it’s a chance to see what the Local SEO hive mind is thinking. I highly recommend checking it out to see how people are thinking about local search rankings. Coming out of the 2017 version, the talk of the town…

As the news of Yext’s S-1 filing in advance of its IPO makes it way throughout the Search industry, I can’t help but think that it will be a seminal event in the annals of Local Search. I’ll leave it to others to pore through the S-1 and pick it apart, and it appears there is plenty to pick at, at least amongst my skeptical followers: Pretty big news for the Local Search industry: https://t.co/EXsTpO4nYj — ((Andrew Shotland)) (@localseoguide) March 13, 2017…

Let me start out by saying I don’t really know Larry Kim. I have had a few conversations with him on Twitter. He seems like a smart, hard-working entrepreneur. I have never used his company, Wordstream, so I can’t really speak to anything about Larry or his service other than what I occasionally read on Twitter or what he publishes elsewhere. But some 2017 SEO predictions he published a few days ago kind of chapped my hide and I am…

If you have been paying attention to the countless pieces put out, you know that “near me” searches to find a local business are climbing rapidly. Just check out how Google Trends evaluates the search trend of the term “near me” for their search engine: Not only has “near me” risen as a whole, but specific near me searches have also skyrocketed: These searches are being heavily driven by mobile searches and the proliferation of using mobile devices, like smartphones, as a primary…